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Brown University Creates Online Course for High School Students

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Brown University Creates Online Course for High School Students

By Michael A. Wilner April 17, 2013 5:53 amApril 17, 2013 5:53 am

When Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the California Institute of Technology, began promoting his online course on machine learning, one person he turned to was Caltech’s dean of admissions. Dr. Abu-Mostafa believed that prospective Caltech students would benefit from learning what it actually takes to be an engineer — something that high schools, on the whole, fail to teach adequately.

National Science Foundation statistics lend credence to his worries: while one in 10 students in the United States enter college with the intention of majoring in engineering, nearly half of those students fail to complete their degree requirements.

“University is a mystery to these students, and they really don’t know what they’re getting into a lot of the time,” said Dr. Abu-Mostafa, whose course ultimately attracted 100,000 subscribers. He estimates that one in 10 were in high school, based on the number of e-mails he received from different age groups.

“The class crystallized their interests,” he said, “and gave them some confidence going into the field.”

Now, in what seems to be the first major effort by a university to tailor a massive open online course, or MOOC, specifically to high school students, Brown University is preparing to offer a free online engineering class with the aim of teaching high school students about the merits and challenges of the field.

If the program is truly unprecedented, as Brown’s team has come to believe, it could start a trend of directly advising high school students and their teachers on specific curriculums, motivated in part by the hypercompetitive college admissions process.

“Students who are considering taking these courses should know it’s not going to help them get into Brown.”

— Jesse Schreier, instructional designer at Brown University

“The real goal here is to get students interested in engineering to better understand engineering, so that they can make good decisions about what they do in the next step,” said Wendy Drexler, director of online development at Brown. “If they decide that they’re interested in engineering and they want to apply to different engineering schools, we want them to have all the information they need.”

The course is based more on activities and research assignments than on video lectures, in an effort to challenge students to actually build something, Dr. Drexler said. Students will also receive guidance on what types of courses they should look for when applying to colleges.

“This is the kind of innovative leadership that can be a game changer for students,” said Josh Coates, chief executive of Instructure, the software company that provided the platform for Brown’s project. “We all know we need more STEM education, and bridging the gap between college and high school with an open online course is a great way to get more kids into these kinds of fields and more interested in the college experience.”

The 500-person cap for the first course section, which began April 1, was met in December. Teachers have also expressed interest in incorporating the course work into their own classes, Dr. Drexler said.

“Students who are considering taking these courses should know it’s not going to help them get into Brown. It’s really about learning what it’s like to be an engineer,” said Jesse Schreier, the instructional designer for the course. “There’s absolutely no guarantee that Brown admissions is going to look on an applicant with kinder eyes.”

Still, Brown’s online development team is debating whether to offer a certificate of some kind to students who complete the course, which officials know would be used as yet another college application supplement. Coursera offers such certificates upon course completion, and some students are already beginning to use them to bolster their college résumés.

“There’s clearly a recognition around the country that American students would benefit from broader engineering literacy,” said Sanjay E. Sarma, director of digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who applauded Brown’s efforts. “Will this play into the application? Certainly. But the last thing that I would want is for parents to have their students sit at home at the computer taking these courses at the expense of other projects.”

The officials behind the Brown initiative said their primary motivation was a larger national concern: the growing shortage of engineering graduates in a job market that demands them, as a result of misinformation, insufficient preparation and fears about the difficulty of engineering. And the idea of offering something free and open — unlike the costly, in-person summer extension programs run by Brown and many of its peers — seemed to have tremendous potential beyond just giving students a glimpse of what Brown, as a single institution, has to offer.

“If a student wants to get into the University of Michigan and they’ve actually shown that they’re already passionate about this topic, and they’ve taken that extra step to learn more about engineering, and if they have all the other credentials they need, then yes, that definitely is going to set them apart,” Dr. Drexler said. “It’s how you reflect your passion. If you look at it that way, then yes, it can be a positive addition to a college application.”

Based on the success of this course, Brown is likely to expand its MOOC offerings for high school students to other disciplines. But for now, it is approaching the project as many universities are approaching MOOCs: with cautious optimism, a sense of excitement and full acceptance that their initiatives may not succeed.

“If it weren’t for the fact that my father was a professor of engineering, I wouldn’t have known what a creative discipline it is,” said Nick McKeown, a professor at Stanford University who is teaching an online course for the university’s Class2Go program. “The word ‘engineering’ comes from the root ‘ingenious.’ It’s all about creation and invention. Teaching high school kids about that is wonderful, so I think the Brown program sounds fantastic.”

Great effort and great way to get the information out to the students through Online courses. I know that a Program called Project lead the Way also trys to inform students through high school classes about the requirements and amount of work needed for engineering fields.

Excellent! Happy to see my alma mater catching up. Three years behind the West Coast ex Stanford professor, but a great way to give kids on the East Coast the chance to study and put down the video games. Great option for parents that can’t afford to send their child to an “Ivy League “institution. Offering a certificate upon successful completion would be a bonus, however it would need to clearly state what the participant’s relationship was with Brown. For seeing one would use such document to enhance their work or college application.

I’ve always found it odd that university engineering programs graduate only half of the young people who enroll in their programs nationwide, but instead of working on ways to retain and graduate more of those students they seem to continue to focus on “weeding out” Freshman through rigorous courses (mostly in Calculus and Physics).

As a mom of a Brown graduate who entered as an engineering major but graduated in another (though related) field, I say hurrah! My son tried to find out what engineering would be like at Brown, even going to a talk by the head of the department, but really had little idea.

However, to include this as part of the application process takes away its informative role and transforms it to another tick mark for applications. I hope Brown does what it can to NOT consider enrollment for admission, and makes such a stance clear to its applicants.

This actually makes sense. There are too many kids that pad their resume with ECs for the express purpose of getting into a selective school. The vast majority of these ECs really do not help them out in the long run (although you could argue it is not a bad use of time). Now kids can do something that really shows why they should be admitted. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the absolutely insane “holistic” admissions process.

My son will soon graduate with a degree in electrical engineering. Throughout elementary and high school there were no incentives for boys to learn more about the field. Instead, there was ‘take your DAUGHTER to work day’ , as well as WOMEN in engineering summer camps provided by IBM. Very frustrating as a parent to see this discrimination. Thankfully, some passionate professors during college visits inspired him.

A few thought: As to the 30 to 50% dropout rate in engineering: not everyone can be what they want to be in life no matter how hard they try, a medical doctor, attorney, engineer, etc. Engineers make the impossible possible and not everyone is cut out to do that. Rather the student finds out early versus goes through with massive debt for a job they cannot perform well. Being smart is not enough. Some professions come with a massive amount of ethics, integrity, and responsibility. Engineers have the opportunity to kill many , where doctors/attorneys usually only can kill one at a time. Keep in mind that the person who graduated last in medical school is still called Dr. They may be a very talented surgeon compared to their high GPA peers or they may not. It is up to the customer to determine the quality of the professional they would like to engage because we are not all created equal. Some are mediocre and some are exceptional. Graduating with an engineering degree does not mean the graduate will be successful as a practicing engineer. Note: Engineering in the US is dominated by males (mostly white males over age 50); hence the initiative to engage females at a very young age to create diversity and avoid group think. Ladies, how many public restrooms have you noticed where the cubicles were installed in a non-functional way? Toilet roll is too low to floor, toilet too close to wall, door opens inward with little to no clearance with toilet? Hand dryer/paper too far from sink? No hot water for hand washing? Who installed all those items?

My question is, Why just engineering? What a great insight to Brown if all the departments offered ‘demo’ courses! The courses shouldn’t be graded and should never be given credit toward anything. No certificates! Students in high school should be thrilled with the opportunity to be exposed to real ivy courses online!

It is a great article on career planning in electrical engineering. It will be great to have some MOOCS on career planning, college accreditation, medical studies, etc. These courses should address the needs of different disciplines.

Kudos to Brown! As a Lehigh University freshman in the late 1980’s, I initially considered engineering as a major. And as it turns out, I graduated with a degree in business with a psych minor. This online class that Brown is offering presents a huge opportunity for high school students. It is my hope that programs like this will expand in the future to include other disciplines!

The online approach can really benefit first generation and other underrepresented groups. Having access to this type of information will be helpful for students who are need to navigate their academic path and future careers.

we do NOT need STEM fields. there is a huge oversupply and the average post-doc makes about the same salary as a garbage collector in this country. we produce about 5X as many PhDs as job openings and “For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.”